Steven High: Cultural Guide

by Chérie L. Turner

Steven High has guided the Nevada Museum of Art (NMA) through a dramatic decade of growth. When he arrived in 1996, the small museum was almost unknown, even within Reno. "It was the stealth museum," says High. Now NMA occupies a spectacular new building, has a permanent collection of both quality and focus and hosts a continual procession of world-class exhibits. Membership numbers have exceeded expectations by 50 percent and 2005 attendance has surpassed projections by 25 percent.

What brought you to NMA?

I was an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, running their contemporary art museum. I had grown up in the West; my first museum job was in the West at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. There's a sense of space we have in the West that is really hard to define. I started to crave it.

This Nevada Museum of Art job became available and I applied. It had a half a milliondollar budget, a small staff and a very small space, but I was really impressed by the board. It was energetic and visionary. The community impressed me. This was '96 and Reno was changing and growing.

What were some of your ideas coming in?

We first set out to raise the visibility of the organization. We set aside a larger chunk of our budget for bringing in exhibitions and for curating exhibitions of a grander scale. At the same time, we set about building friends within the philanthropic community, because in order to accomplish those things, we had to raise the budget. So we worked on that for about two years. We did a Joan Miró/Jean DuBuffet exhibition that was really spectacular. In 1998, we curated "Picturing the Sierra Nevada," then an Auguste Rodin exhibition with the Canter Foundation. With Rodin, we had to actually limit the amount of people in the museum. That exhibition demonstrated that we had reached capacity. We had also been marketing our museum school and that had grown to where we couldn't add any more classes. We had reached this point where either we had to grow or stay where we were. But when you plateau, you are eventually going to fall off because people aren't going to stay interested.

In the fall of '97, we began crafting an idea of what a new museum would look like. Over the next two years, we developed the plan. We continued to bring in interesting shows, raise the profile of the museum and develop our fund-raising capacity. Doing all those things prepared us to begin the campaign for the new building in '99.

What aspect of the new nma are you most proud of?

The fact that we not only built a building, but that we've been able to live in the building and be financially sound. Everyone thinks building it is the biggest challenge, but the challenge is staying financially solvent after you've opened the building. You double your staff and your budget in a week and you're still the same organization with basically the same fundraising capacity. Many new museums find themselves going into big debt, even going broke. We set from the very beginning that we wouldn't do anything that would risk the organization itself. This organization has been around since 1931.

What does the future hold for NMA?

Organizations work in cycles. There will be a period of time where you are maximizing all of the elements—we went through a 400 percent expansion on this project. Then there's a period of time where you stabilize, figure out how everything runs and make sure your financing capability can keep pace with your growth. We're to that point that we're starting to get it. We know how the building works and how to be efficient for energy usage. We know we can handle any type of exhibition in terms of security. We're beginning to maximize the use of this facility. So now we have to start thinking: What's next?

The one thing we don't want to do is be only a regional museum. An important role that the museum plays is to bring the outside in—bring in the global and connect that with the local to make it relevant. Over the last seven years, we've slowly built partnerships with museums internationally.

We're not going to build an encyclopedic permanent collection. In this day, even a contemporary work of art will go for seven figures; my annual budget is three million dollars. But we need to work very consciously on building a collection that will tell stories for our community. We've created a sense of content around works about the environment, how artists represent the environment. "Picturing the Sierra Nevada" is an excellent example. In the early days, in the 1860s and '70s, these paintings were the only representation of the West. That kind of action is happening today. We have Michael Heizer out in the middle of the Nevada desert creating a massive city he's been working on for twenty-some years. Then you have Burning Man—an amazing counter-culture event that is totally embedded in the arts.

Reno is probably one of the centers of environmental studies in the country or in the world for that matter. We have the Desert Research Institute, which is about understanding the environment on a global scale. We have people who are very knowledgeable about these issues. How can we connect them to what we're doing?